Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion

andrea
2006-07-26T17:19:20Z

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 01:02:36PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 06:06:04PM +0200, andrea@cpushare.com wrote:
> > JFYI: all statistics only take a sample of the larger space, the whole
> > point of having a statistic is because you can't measure the total.
> > The smaller the sample compared to the total, the less the stats are
> > accurate
>
> Definitely not true in general. If I wanted to know the gender ratio at
> the latest OLS I'd take the results from a sample of a dozen chosen
> randomly over the results from a sample of hundreds all taken from the
> men's room.

Well, your example is perhaps the worst one since you wouldn't be
decreasing the quality of your stats very much by only doing the
sample in the men's room ;). I guess you meant the woman's room.

> For exactly the same quality of sampling, yes, the larger the better,
> but the point of diminishing returns comes pretty quickly. So given
> limited resources it's probably more important to work on the quality of
> the sample rather than on its size....

No matter how you see it, the larger the better (in the worst case it
won't make a difference). Certainly if I could work on the quality,
that would be more important than adding 1 more user. But I can't work
on the quality.